Month: March 2016

Deeper Down the Credit Hole And a Critique of Big Banks

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It has been a little under 2 months from our first churning credit card application (read more about that here).  In case you have no idea what I am talking about, credit card churning is the process of signing up for credit cards with the sole goal of collecting hefty signup bonuses from the bank. We have a trip planned for Costa Rica this summer and we wanted to see just how much money we could knock off the total bill.

The first credit card that I targeted was the Capital One Venture card.  I just completed the requirements to get the bonus for that card and the 40,000 bonus points posted soon after.Screen Shot 2016-03-13 at 2.20.46 PM

I was able to redeem the full point total against a plane ticket to Costa Rica to knock $460.37 off a $494.58 ticket.  93% off airfare isn’t too shabby!

Shae also got into the game and completed the requirements for the Barclaycard Arrival Plus.  When we purchased airfare, we did it in two separate transactions so that we would be able to redeem multiple credit card bonuses against the cost.

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Barclaycard Arrival + is a very similar setup to the Capital One Venture card.  40,000 bonus points are awarded for spending $3k in 3 months.  One of the small differences between the two is that the BA+ card can only be redeemed in increments of 2500 points.  Shae was able to get $450 applied towards a $494.58 airfare.

I am quite pleased that with two cards we were able to save $910.37 in travel expenses.  That will go a long way to reducing the cost of our Costa Rica trip this summer.

But Wait, There’s More!

I’ll admit it.  I got hooked.  Credit card churning has been an enjoyable distraction for me.  If you read the fine print, have clear goals, and a modicum of self discipline you can rack up quite a bit of ‘free’ money.

My spreadsheet has grown considerably from that initial blog post two months ago.  Yes, it is color coded now according to the card issuer.  Click on the image below to see a bigger more readable version.

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In total we have applied for 8 cards.

Chase Freedom

  • Annual Fee: $0
  • Bonus: $150 + $50 for referer
  • Min Spend: $500
  • Min Spend Deadline: 3 months

I already have this card and it is one that I use on a monthly basis.  Chase keeps sending me emails to pimp this card out to my friends and family.  If someone signs up for the card through my referral link, I get $50.  No, I won’t put the link on this blog.

Shae signed up through the link however so this card should net us an easy $200 and because it has no annual fee, she can hold onto it forever.

BankAmericard Travel Rewards

  • Annual Fee: $0
  • Bonus: $200 statement credit
  • Min Spend: $1000
  • Min Spend Deadline: 3 months

Both Shae and I applied for this card.  Shae was approved and I was denied.  Ironically, because I didn’t have enough credit card accounts.  Hehehe.  The plan is to use the card and bonus for Costa Rica lodging.

Chase Sapphire Preferred

  • Annual Fee: $89, waived first year
  • Bonus: 55000 Ultimate Reward Points (between $550 and $687)
  • Min Spend: $4000
  • Min Spend Deadline: 3 months

I got this card for future travel.  We plan to meet the min spend by paying our property taxes with it.  Yes, our property taxes are almost $4000/year.  We might as well get a bonus while we rip off the tape.

IHG Rewards Club

  • Annual Fee: $49, waived first year
  • Bonus: 60,000 points + $50 statement credit OR 80,000 points
  • Min Spend: $1000
  • Min Spend Deadline: 3 months

I got this hotel credit card because it is a surprisingly good value.  In addition to the one time bonus, you also get a free night every year starting on your second year of membership.  Essentially, you get a $49 night at any IHG hotel.  The lower tier hotels start free nights at 5-10k points.  80k reward points would be enough for around 8 free nights.  If you figure those are $80 nights normally, then the bonus is worth around $640.

Chase Total Checking

  • Monthly Fee: $12 unless criteria are met
  • Bonus: $300
  • Bonus Requirement: Make a direct deposit of at least $500.
  • Bonus Req Deadline: 2 months

This one isn’t a credit card!  It is a checking account.  The $300 bonus was a targeted offer that Chase sent me.  They really want me to be a customer, so they offered a big bonus to lure me in.  The requirements are pretty easy to meet.  Open it up in branch with the targeted coupon code, dump $1500 in to satisfy the monthly fee requirements, and then make a direct deposit of $500.  Wait 6 months to satisfy the fine print and then close the account.  Abbra Cadabra, $300 for about 3 hours of work.

Wrapping Up

All told we are looking at about $3200 in bonus churning provided that we meet the various requirements and are able to optimize the bonus redemptions.  I like that I can do most of this from my computer and it doesn’t hurt that we can stick it to big companies in the process.

Speaking of Which

Did you see the credit limits that we were approved for?!  Holy crap.  No wonder why Americans are in debt up to their eyeballs.  It is so easy to get ridiculously high credit lines.  Why in the world do credit card companies think that handing out $127,900 of available credit to a couple of twenty year olds is a good idea.  The morbid reason is simple, the companies are hoping we self destruct and spend more than we can pay off.  If we fell into that trap, then the companies make money in insanely high APRs ranging from 14% all the way up to 22%.  These companies want people to pay the minimum.  So sure, give Andrew a credit limit of $25,000 and hope he screws up and becomes a wage slave.  That is why I have zero empathy and zero remorse from milking these card issuers for big bonuses.  I’ll play the game, but I’ll play it on my terms.

Picking Up the Digital Living Room

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You know how our homes can get messy.  Well, our digital homes can also get messy and cluttered as well.  Last week, I received an account notice from my website hosting provider informing me that I was at 80% capacity of my allocated disk space.  In plain English, I needed to declutter.

The images stored on the server for this blog, yes all those cutesy photos of Frugal Boy, were taking up about 50% (2.5 GB) of the digital living room.  I had four choices.

  1. Pay $20/month more to double the room size (5 GB -> 10 GB).  Then the blog images would only take up 25%.
  2. Stop blogging
  3. Delete or downsize existing images.  This would be like taking scissors to a shoebox of old photos.
  4. Move all of those images to a storage locker outside of the house.

I decided to go ahead with option 4.  While my hosting provider charges a premium for storage space, there are many other companies that offer abundant storage for cheap.  In simple terms, I could keep the same living room and just move all of the junk to a storage locker.

You are probably already familiar with Amazon.com, the mega online retailer.  What you may not know is that Amazon offers a variety of web services as well.  Collectively, these AWS (Amazon Web Services) power many of the behind the scenes things of websites and mobile apps that you use everyday.  One of their most popular services is the S3 storage service.  It is a pay for what you use digital storage service.  The pricing is a bit complicated because they calculate it on how much space you use and how often you need access to the stuff in that space.  Imagine a storage locker that billed you according to how many square feet you used and how many times you put things in or took things out.

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While I will have to wait for the dust to settle from moving all of those files over, I estimate that the normal month will cost me less than 50¢.

Content Delivery Network

Going along with our analogy of a storage locker, suppose that the locker is in Virginia and you live in California.  It would take a long time to go all the way to Virginia and back to get a photo.  Here is an example of a link to one such photo.

http://blog.andrewschenk.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Andrew-Shae.jpg

You can see how there is my storage locker name “blog.andrewschenk.com” and that it is in the S3 facility “s3.amazonaws.com”.

Wouldn’t it be more convenient if there was a storage locker in California too and while we’re at it, how about one in every major city in the world.  That is what CDNs, Content Delivery Networks, do.  They make a copy of the original contents in Virginia and then set up identical lockers all over the world.  Now you can go to the locker that is closest to you!

Here is the same image as above, except this time, the link will take you to the closest locker to you.

http://d2ql3eiz1dngwz.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Andrew-Shae.jpg

Amazon offers a CDN service called CloudFront.  There are a bunch of other CDN providers out there and any major website that you visit will utilize one.

By using a CDN, I save some money on people making trips to the Virginia facility.  It also speeds up the page loading on this website so you have a better viewing experience.

We can go one step further however.  While the above URL works just fine, it doesn’t look very pretty.  Thankfully, we can mask that and give it a different name.  It’s a lot like how 1-800 numbers sometimes use letters and words to make an ugly number easier to remember.

In technical terms, I set up a CNAME alias for the DNS system.

The final result is a URL that looks like this:

http://images.andrewschenk.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Andrew-Shae.jpg

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, by offloading the storage to Amazon I should be able to save about $234 a year.  I think I got everything squared away, but if you see a blank box where an image should be let me know what blog post it is and I can take a look at it.  Sometimes things get broken in a move!

Voting in a Primary Election

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The Illinois primary is in two days.  Illinois uses an open primary system, meaning when you go to vote you can choose either the Republican ballot or the Democrat ticket.  I consider this a great way of doing it, because you are not locked into a single party.  There is a wide spectrum of candidates on either side of the aisle.

You might have already voted if your state is one of the earlier primaries, or you probably already know which presidential candidate you plan to vote for.  Just today, Trump stopped in our town for a last minute rally.  About 3000 supporters turned out, and about a third of that in protesters staged outside.  We steered clear of the whole mess.

trump in BNThe local elections are far less fiery and in my opinion far more important.  The Republican ballot has a senate race (incumbent) and a county coroner contest (incumbent) in addition to the presidential nomination.  The Democrat ballot has just the presidential and senate race.

 

The last time the coroner was on the ticket there were a total of 6800 votes.

The Luck of The Irish

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Yesterday morning I felt great when I woke up.  Feeling rested and energetic, I took Frugal Boy for a sprightly run at 6:30.  This morning, Frugal Boy was eager to repeat the antics of the day before, but my body wasn’t.  Still, I pulled myself from bed at his beckoning and went downstairs to put on my running shoes.

Shae was already down in the kitchen putting together a breakfast snack cup for our son.  She had picked up a dent and ding clearance box of Special K cereal for about 49% off.

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“Huh” she said.  She had stopped opening the box and was just standing there.  I finished putting on my shoes and a bit annoyingly asked, “Huh what”.

“We won”

“What?  It’s probably just some gimmick”

“It says that we won”

I crossed the room and looked inside.

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I was still highly skeptical.  We have received instant winners in the past that contain a lot of fine print and aren’t actually winners but instead are entries to be a winner.  She opened up the other dent and ding box, and there was no winning sticker inside of that one.  We put the box aside and went for our run.  It was a good run and helped to wake me up.  Shae is angling for a sub 25 minute 5k this year.  We did 1.5 miles this morning at a 9 even pace, so I feel optimistic that she will achieve her goal.

Coming back inside, we read the fine print.  I was inclined to believe it was for real when the instructions said to send the winning piece by certified mail.

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The abbreviated rules on the bottom listed the odds at 1:32,500

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Here’s to you dent and ding box.

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Shae nor I have ever won an instant sweeps.  The only person that I know that has was my oldest brother when he was in college about 40 years ago (okay, maybe not that long).  He won a tv.

No, we aren’t going to buy a lottery ticket or alter our behavior in any way (read here for the abysmal odds on that).  Sometimes you are just in the right place at the right time.  It doesn’t make you special or right.

49% off a box of cereal.

99% off a tablet ($5.34 in postage).

Happy (early) Saint Patrick’s day!

Learning How To Bake Week 4 – Apple Turnovers

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The extent of my baking knowledge up until now has been to follow the instructions on the back of the ready mix boxes.  Come along with Shae and myself as we embark on a six week baking challenge where we push our comfort zones and try baking recipes we have never done before!

Week 4 – Apple Turnovers

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We chose apple turnovers because we wanted to make a puff pastry.  In particular, we wanted to make a full puff pastry.  Normally, a turnover recipe has you use pre-prepared pastry rolls from the store, and while that greatly cuts down the work and time required, it doesn’t teach us anything about the process!

So how does one make a flaky, crisp pastry dough?  Easy!  All you need is flour, water, salt, and a metric ton of butter.

We all put our aprons on, Frugal Boy too after much convincing, and got out the stand mixer to combine 5 cups of flour with a teaspoon of salt and 2 cups of water.  You’ll want to add the water in slowly otherwise the dough gets very hard and tough to roll out.

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While you are doing that, you’ll want to get out a block o butter.  This recipe called for 2 cups worth.  Sandwich it with plastic wrap and get out something heavy, like a rolling pin.

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Then pound the butter flat and stick it in the fridge to chill.

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After the dough has rested, and the butter has chilled, you can roll out the dough.

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And yes, that is the manliest apron we have.

Once the dough is rolled out, place the butter on top.  We are going to start laminating the dough and butter.

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Here begins the lengthy part.  In order to laminate the butter and dough together, you will repeat folding the dough and butter into thirds, rolling it out flat again and sticking it back in the refrigerator to chill.  You don’t want the butter to melt into the dough.  After about six times of doing this, you will end up with a nicely layered dough/butter creation.

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The whole point of layering butter in the dough is to have it expand (some might even say puff) when baking.  The butter steams up and gives a wonderful flakiness to the finished pastry.

Now that you have your finished pastry dough, you can roll it out to a 1/4 inch thickness or thinner and shape as desired.  Traditional apple turnover recipes call for cutting out squares from the rolled dough, placing the apple filling into the square, and folding the dough over before baking.  We opted to make cups instead.

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Look at those beautiful layers!

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We finished off the apple cups by adding a sugar glaze.

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They are best eaten fresh from the oven.  Over time they will get soggy and lose their crispiness.  If you buy the pastry dough pre-made the recipe only takes about 60 minutes to make.  If you make the dough from scratch, it will take several hours.

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We have two weeks left on this 6 week challenge.  Leave a comment on what we should try baking next!